Ultra Wide Band – A New Wireless Technology in Digital Home

There are several LAN (Local Area Network) technology that can link up communication devices in home networking such as wireless 802.11 a/b/g, Homeplug AV, MoCA (Multimedia Over Coaxial cable) and more. Among these technologies, the most well known one would be 802.11 a/b/g wireless technology that doesn’t require cable and capable of handling high bandwidth. Besides 802.11 wireless technology, some of us may not aware that there is another type of wireless technology known as UWB (Ultra Wide Band) which could support even higher throughput of up to 100 Mbps for wireless streaming in digital home.
As the name mentioned, Ultra Wide Band operates in a very wide spectral range from 3.1GHz up to 10.6 GHz. The bandwidth is about 80 times wider as compared to 802.11 which stay around 17 MHz. In terms of power transmission, UWB has very low transmit power of about 0.1 mW, which is far lesser than 50mW required on 802.11 technologies.

With such a low transmit power, UWB has advantage over 802.11 in extending battery life of communication devices, while it doesn’t compromise in the range that it can reach. Surprisingly, it can cover up to10 meter radius as similar to 802.11 technology. This could be contributed by different modulation technique which is less susceptible to interference and multipath fading.

More customer electronics products with integrated UWB feature can be expected to be on the shelves by mid of 2007.